Ruling Party Sets Out To Chart Syria's Future

June 18, 2000|By HUGH DELLIOS Chicago Tribune

DAMASCUS, Syria — One week after the death of President Hafez Assad, Syria's ruling Baath Party convened for the first time in 15 years on Saturday to begin charting a course through a maze of challenges facing the nation.

Bashar Assad, expected to be named the party's secretary general to replace his father, sat front and center in an audience of 1,038 delegates who opened the three-day congress with a moment of silence and then quickly pledged allegiance to him.

Assad, an eye doctor with little political experience, appeared at ease as he was swarmed by TV cameras and admirers, deflecting questions about his priorities regarding Mideast peace, badly needed modernization and a crackdown on corruption.

"We salute the hope of the future Bashar Assad," said Suleiman Qaddah, the assistant secretary general of the party, who opened the congress in place of the elder Assad. "We are with you, comrade, and behind you we will continue the march to express our loyalty to the path of Assad."

Among the urgent issues before the congress will be Syria's response to a brewing crisis in next-door Lebanon after the Hezbollah "resistance" movement rejected the United Nations' verification that Israel had withdrawn from its occupation zone there.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced Friday that U.N. teams concluded that the Israeli army had completed its retreat after 22 years. That should have cleared the way for a beefed up U.N. peacekeeping force to fill a security vacuum in south Lebanon.

But Hezbollah officials said in a statement Saturday that they considered Annan's announcement "inaccurate, unrealistic and hasty" and accused the United Nations of turning into "a cover for the continuation of the Zionist occupation of Lebanese land."

The Syrians, who have 35,000 troops in Lebanon and could control Hezbollah's actions, did not immediately react to Annan's announcement.

The Baath Party Congress originally was planned by Hafez Assad to shore up party support for his son's future succession. It was the first congress that Assad had called in 15 years -- since even before the breakup of his Cold War backer, the Soviet Union.

Instead, the congress has become one more step in a carefully orchestrated sequence that will make Bashar Assad Syria's new supreme leader. Already named army commander in chief, he likely will be elected party boss on Monday and then face a popular, single-name referendum for the presidency within a matter of weeks. The elder Assad used to win such referendums with 99 percent of the vote.

With Bashar Assad's influence, the party congress also will name a powerful new 21-member ruling council. Its makeup may indicate whether Assad, a proponent of computerization and modernization, is secure enough to move forward with reforms.

Most of the first session's proceedings were taken up by tributes to the two Assads before it broke up into committee meetings.

"We are seeing a great awakening; nations rising against the oppression of finance and calls to bring down the savage capitalism and its tools, such as the World Bank and the IMF," said Wisal Bakdash, a senior official of the Syrian Communist Party, one of several sister parties invited to join the Baathists on the stage.

Such rhetoric hints at the difficulties Assad could face in any drive to reform Syria's largely state-controlled and protectionist economy or to make any dramatic peace overtures to the Israelis. And at least in the hallways, he was deferring to the congress when asked what his priorities would be. "It's their priorities," Assad told journalists in English, motioning toward the hall full of party leaders, businessmen and government officials over whom his father had almost compete sway.